Spanish Disco

is a transplanted New Yorker who now calls South Florida home. She is a writer and editor who has worked in publishing for over a decade. She is the coauthor of two books of humor writing, and the coauthor of The Sixty Second Commute about the home office phenomenon, as well as two books for children, including The Best Friends’ Handbook, aimed at empowering teen and preteen girls. As an editor and ghostwriter, she has worked behind the scenes on many publishing successes.

Erica despises the “c-word” (cooking) and likes to write on her laptop, poolside. She presides over a house of unruly pets, including a parrot who curses as avidly as she does. She loves playing poker, a game she was taught by her grandmother, and regularly enjoys trying to steal her crew of wonderful friends’ money playing five-card stud.

Spanish Disco

Erica Orloff

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my parents, Walter and Maryanne Orloff.

And to the memory of Robert and Irene Cunningham.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my wonderful, beloved agent, Jay Poynor, for always believing in me and my work. You are friend, cheering section, critic, confidant, and family.

To my father, Walter Orloff. I am a writer because, first and foremost, you are a terribly interesting character. Second, you are the father in chapter thirteen who challenged me to read well beyond my years. All I am is because you challenged me.

To my mother, Maryanne Orloff, who bears no resemblance to the mother in the pages herein. My love of reading stems from your love of reading. Thank you for taking me to the library in second grade, letting me sign out seven books on a Friday and taking me back on Monday to sign out new ones.

To my sisters, Stacey Groome and Jessica Stasinos, and to my girlfriends, Pammie, Cleo, Nancy, Kathy L., Kathy J., Lisa, JoAnn and Meredith…for your friendship and support. To Kathy Levinson, in particular, for tolerating my trips to New York (and giving me a place to stay) with my over-the-top fear of flying. You are my personal “flying shrink.” Thanks to Marc Levinson, as well—same reasons. And to Pam Morrell, especially, thanks for believing I am “winsome.”

To the members of Writer’s Cramp: Pam, Gina, Becky…and Josh.

To the members of my women’s book group, for your friendship (and great food once a month).

At Red Dress Ink, thank you to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, for your insight and wisdom and belief in this book. And to all the people at Red Dress who made this book possible.

To Alexa, Nicholas and Isabella. Thank you for giving me a reason to breathe.

To my godmother, Gloria, and to my cousin Joey D., because I always promised you I would mention you in my book.

To the late Viktor Frankl. I live because of your philosophy.

To anyone I’ve somehow left out. You know I’m not that organized, so please forgive me.

And finally, to J.D.

You know all my secrets, even the ones I share with no one else, and you know all my pain and joys. And though I often want to kill you, you make me laugh every day.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Book Group Questions

1

“H ello, Buttercup.”

Most people panic that a jangling phone at 4:09 in the morning is a death call—the one in which a cop is about to tell you he’s found your sibling or mother or father plastered like a bloody possum on the pavement of I-95. Instead, I uttered his name like a curse: “Michael!”

“Yes, darling, it’s me.”

I reached in vain for the lamp.

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking if you know what time it is.”

“What would David have for breakfast?”

“Breakfast?”

“Because I think eggs indicates a surprising lack of concern about his health. After all, his wife has been nagging him for years about his cholesterol. His smoking. And this could be his lone act of defiance. His way of telling the world to fuck off, as you, my dear, would so eloquently put it.”

“Or he could merely like sunny-side up and a side of bacon, Michael. Is it that important what your character eats for breakfast?”

My fingers found the little pull-chain on my bedside lamp. I squinted and reached for the glass of warm bourbon and water I keep on my nightstand for conversations precisely like this one.

“Vitally.”

“Michael, you know I am not at my best until a good, solid six hours from now. And that only after a pot of coffee. Can’t this wait?”

“Be a love,” he said, his English accent trying to charm me through the phone line. “Greet the dawn with me.”

“Greet the dawn? Michael, I don’t want to greet the dawn with you. I don’t want to greet noon with you.”

“Impossible! You don’t want to enjoy the splendor outside your balcony with me? Your favorite author?”

“Favorite is not—most definitely not—the word that comes to mind right now.” I sighed. “Those acknowledgments better drip with praise.”

“To my dream editor, the love of my life, Cassie Hayes, without whom this book would not be possible and without whom I would curl into a fetal position and remain there. For life without the beautiful and witty Miss Hayes would, in fact, be life not worth living at all.”

“That’s a start.”

“And she has a remarkable sense of the sublime and a true command of all dangling participles.”

“And?”

“And she’s simply charming before the dawn.”

Stretching, I sighed. “All right. Let me grab my robe and start a pot of coffee.”

“Are you naked, Cassie?”

Michael Pearton was, quite possibly, the best writer I had ever worked with or read. He was also faintly mysterious. His back cover head shots showed a man with black curly hair and a crooked smile offset by a long, ragged scar on his decidedly square chin. He was both movie-star handsome and bar-fight dangerous. We’d never met but indulged in flirtation bordering on phone sex. Because I wasn’t getting any other kind of sex, I tolerated his predawn ramblings.

“Why, yes, Michael, I am,” I murmured. “Stark, raving naked. My nipples are hard because you know I keep my house colder than a meat locker regardless of what the weather is outside. And I am now shoving said nipples into my robe and shuffling in my bare feet to the kitchen where I will start a pot of coffee.”

I rested the portable phone on my shoulder, talking in my pre-coffee rasp as I tied my green silk kimono, a gift from another author’s trip to Singapore.

“I do so love it when you talk dirty, Cassie.”

“I do so love it when you call me in the middle of the day.”

“So nasty when you haven’t had that cup. You know you should switch to tea, love. Do you ever use the set I shipped you?”

I flicked on the kitchen light, shielding my eyes from the brightness as it reflected on my Florida-white tile and cabinets, and stared at the sterling tea set perched, never used, on my breakfast bar. He had bought it at a flea market of some sort and shipped it over to the States. It was tarnished, but the elaborate handle on the teapot was ornately baroque, and though it matched nothing in my condominium, I adored it.

“Yes. It’s gorgeous.”

“You’re a horrible liar. But I know it probably looks lovely wherever you have it.”

“Michael, why does inspiration only strike you in the middle of my night?”

My Mr. Coffee machine started making noises, and I willed it to brew faster.

“It’s very odd really. I go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night absolutely certain of what must happen next. Oh…and showers. I get inspiration in the shower. And now, everyone else in London is getting ready for lunch, and I just have to finish this scene. It’s sad, really. I have a twenty-thousand-dollar antique cherrywood desk good enough for the queen herself, and I never write a damn word sitting at it.”

I knew he was sitting stark, raving naked in his bed, with his laptop and a hard-on for companionship.

“So your inspiration is that David is worrying about breakfast?”

“Yes. It’s the morning after he’s been denied tenure. He feels completely emasculated. And now, as an act of defiance, I see him having eggs.”

“Okay, then. Let him eat eggs.”

“What kind?”

“Michael, who the fuck cares what kind?”

“What kind? Would he eat poached eggs or scrambled?”

“I thought I mentioned sunny-side up with a side of bacon.”

“But that was an offhanded comment. I don’t think you really gave it much thought.”

“Poached.”

“You think so, really? What about eggs Benedict? Because then he would be eating all that wicked hollandaise sauce.”

“I don’t care, Michael. Give him hollandaise if it makes you happy. It’s four-thirty.”

“Is your coffee ready yet? You certainly are particularly crabby this morning.”

“Michael, I don’t know a single other editor who would put up with this kind of shit.”

“Precisely. Which is why you have authors eating out of the palm of your hand, and Louis O’Connor has the most successful small publishing house in the States.”

Eyeing the coffeemaker with lust, I smiled. “Coffee’s almost ready. I’ll be human soon.”

A minute or two later, I sat down at my kitchen table an ocean away from West Side Publishing’s most valuable author. Michael clicked away on his keyboard, and I drank coffee and held his hand long distance as we worked through the scene. He’d been blocked. I knew he couldn’t get past the fourteenth chapter. Every book was the same. Somewhere in the middle he lost hope. He gave up. He got sick of his book, its plot, of his own characters. And then he didn’t work for a while until he had an epiphany—usually in the middle of my night—and called me and we talked for hours waiting for the sun to rise and, with it, the resolution of his crisis. Although I think it was an excuse to hear me talk about my nipples.

“Michael,” I yawned two hours later, “the sun is rising.”

“Tell me about it,” he whispered.

I stepped out onto my balcony, facing the view a Boca Raton condo can buy. “Well, the Atlantic’s really calm this morning—a beautiful azure blue. I see a seagull gliding lazily and a pelican swooping down. The sun is just peeking—the horizon is pink and purple and still midnight a little. The crescent moon is sharing the sky with the beginning of the sun. And here it comes…. God, it’s beautiful, Michael.”

The salty breeze kissed my face.

“You give good sunrise, Cassie.”

“Well, if it weren’t for you, I’d never see them, so I guess I should thank you. But I won’t. I’m going back to bed.”

“You’ve had a pot of coffee. Aren’t you wired?”

“No. Good night, Michael.”

“Good morning, Cassie. You are the bloody best. Thank you.”

“May the next time I hear your voice be after lunch.”

I hung up and ran a hand through my bedhead of messy black curls. I padded back to my room, drew the blinds tighter and dropped my robe, crawling sensuously beneath my sheets. I loved the decadence of going back to bed. I picked up the phone and dialed the office, pressing extension 303.

“Lou…it’s me. Michael Pearton had another pre-dawn meltdown. We were on the phone discussing his main character’s menu choices ’til just now. It’s 6:30. I’m exhausted. I won’t be in until at least noon if you’re lucky.”

I shut my eyes and thought I’d skip the whole day at the office. My boss let me work three days at home, thanks to voice mail and e-mail, and his sheer adoration of me. I was supposed to go in on Fridays, but the hell with it. I turned the ringer off on my phone. Sleep returned quickly. I dreamed of swimming in pools of hollandaise.

At 11:00, the phone rang, muffled, out in the kitchen. I could hear the caller ignoring the fact that I wasn’t answering. I heard four rings, a voice speaking. Hang up. Four rings. Voice speaking. Hang up. Four rings…

“Oh for God’s sake, what do you want, Lou?” I finally snatched the receiver next to my bed.

“How’d you know…”

“You’re the only person stubborn enough to do that, Lou.”

“I need you in here today.”

“Sorry. I put in my hours with the ever-neurotic Englishman last night. Or actually, this morning, but you know what I mean. I’ll be in on Monday.”

“This is big.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bigger than Stephen King, big. This could make me millions. Your bonus could send you into early retirement.”

“So who is it?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Lou…this isn’t high school. Not that I think you ever went to high school. You were born eating your young.”

“Cassie, my dear, you come and go out of here as the diva you are. But this one time, I’m telling you to get up, get dressed, and meet me at the office. I will mainline you a pot of coffee.”

“This better be worth it.”

“It is. In spades.”

I climbed out of bed, still far too early for my taste. In the kitchen, I dumped out the grinds in Mr. Coffee, the only man in my condo in the last year and a half, and put on my second pot of the day. After a hot shower, a dab of crimson lipstick, and a sort of shaggy-dog shaking of my hair, I dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, threw a linen blazer on, and headed down Florida’s A1A ocean highway to West Side’s offices.

I’m not sure how it is I came to live in a land of pink palaces and perpetual sunshine. It doesn’t suit my personality. But when Lou moved down here from New York, he took me with him. He came for the fishing and the sunshine. He came to get away from New York after Helen died. And I came because he did.

I climbed out of my mint-condition Cadillac that I bought for a song from the estate of an elderly man who had died. His kids wanted cash. Bargains abound in Florida if you don’t mind owning stuff that belonged to dead people. When Lou first saw it, he thought I was nuts. “A banana-yellow Caddy? You like driving fruit?” But I have claustrophobia. I drive luxury land tanks.

Pressing the elevator button for the seventh floor, I rode up in glass to West Side’s offices.

“Morning, Cassie,” Troy, the receptionist/junior editor, greeted me.

“Mornin’,” I mumbled.

“You look a fright.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Coffee?”

“Intravenous.”

“You got it.” He held out a mug. “Start with this cup, and I’ll bring a fresh one in as soon as it’s brewed.”

I opened the door to Lou’s office without knocking.

“This better be worth it. I’m feeling very bitchy today,” I said, putting the mug down on a mahogany coffee table covered with books West Side had published, and flopping onto a long, buttercream leather couch.

“And how is this different from any other day?”

“If I wanted insults, I would call my mother.”

“Guess who called me in the middle of the night?”

“What is it with authors and the middle of the night, Lou?”

“Indulge me.”

“John Updike?”

“Bigger.”

“I have no clue,” I leaned up on one elbow and took a swig of coffee.

He took the unlit cigar he had in his mouth and set it in his Waterford ashtray.

“Roland Riggs.”

“Holy shit!” I said, as hot coffee sprayed out of my mouth.

2

L ou smiled at me. “I thought that would grab ya!”

The shock hit me as I mopped at coffee dribbling down my chin. I managed to sputter, “What’d he want?”

“You do know my famous Roland Riggs story, right?”

“Do I know it? I’ve been subjected to your Roland Riggs story at every cocktail party you and I have ever attended together. Worse, I’ve been subjected to it secondhand from people who have heard the story and feel the need to tell me. They usually embellish it.”

Troy came in with my second cup of coffee.

“Thanks.” I sucked down a long swig, burning my tongue.

After Troy shut the door, Lou feigned hurt feelings, “All right. So you’ve heard the story. Well…Roland Riggs calls me up in the middle of the night and says—get this— ‘Lou, I guess I was wrong about the computer.’”

Lou’s Roland Riggs story was this: In 1968, Lou was on a fishing trip in Key West. He caught not a single tuna after two days of deep-sea fishing with Key West’s best captain, and he decided to forget the mahi-mahi and settle in for a nice, long beer binge. Lou was sitting at an outdoor patio bar downing a bottle of imported German beer when a disheveled guy about Lou’s age sat down next to him and said, “The Germans are the only ones who can brew beer that doesn’t taste like piss.”

Lou was already a publishing hotshot back then. He knew it was Riggs, even though the author had grown a full beard since his back jacket photo was taken. Roland Riggs, even then, was considered the voice of a generation. He was notoriously moody with his publisher, but he wrote Simple Simon and the world had been waiting to see what he would do next. The book sold out of every printing and still does a brisk business. It’s required reading in nearly every high school English course. Roland Riggs hit the lottery with his tale of lonesome angst and war and the end of the 1950s and all its innocence and conformity and fumbled sex in the back of Dad’s borrowed car.

The two of them started talking. They began with Riggs’s dissertation on German brew-making skills. They moved on to discuss women (discovering they both preferred moody brunettes), music (they both despised anything pseudo-folkish with a tambourine in it), books (no one but Riggs, Faulkner, and Hemingway was worth a damn), society’s ills (marijuana should be legalized), the price of fame (people like Riggs needed to grow ridiculous beards to avoid strangers accosting them) and the cost of the Vietnam war (the soul of the United States). They started talking on a Friday night at ten o’clock and didn’t stop until lunch on Sunday. The last words of their conversation were about the future of technology.

Lou said, “Mark my word, Riggs, one day everyone is going to have a computer—even you. It’s gonna change the way we do everything. Even publish books.”

Riggs had stared out at the ocean, his blue eyes mirroring its color. “I’ll never give up my typewriter, Lou. You’ve had too much German beer.”

With that, the brilliant Roland Riggs stood up, bowed to Lou, and walked down to the turquoise, smooth ocean. He took off his shirt and dove into the water. After splashing about for ten minutes or so, he came out, shook himself like a shaggy dog, and walked, bare-chested, down the beach and out of sight.

“After thirty-some-odd years, Roland Riggs remembered the last words of your conversation?”

“It was a life-changing weekend, Cassie. I remember it.”

“You remember it because it was Roland Riggs. But if he was some faceless beachcomber, you wouldn’t remember a word of it.”

“You underestimate me.” Lou stood and crossed the room, barefoot, to his bookshelf. When Lou moved to Florida, he gave up suits. And shoes. He wore flip-flops to the office and then took them off once inside West Side’s plush, royal-purple-carpeted suite. He encouraged bare-footedness in all his employees: “It’s good for the sole…get it?”

He pulled down his worn copy of Simple Simon.

“This book changed people’s lives.”

“Lou, where’s your cynicism? One call from this guy and you’re misty-eyed. A generation of child-men went through a war, and he gave them a voice. But life-changing? This from the man who gave a contract to Eliza James because she claimed to have sucked Lyndon Johnson’s dick.”

“You’re too young to appreciate what this book meant. I remember people weeping over this damn book. Let Stephen King do that.”

“Danielle Steel makes people weep.”

“Danielle Steel, even with a brain transplant, could never win the Pulitzer.”

“Fine. I concede the book was important. Brilliant. But when I read news stories about Riggs I feel sorry for him. He hated the attention.”

Young men, legless and haunted after Vietnam, camped out in front of the Manhattan apartment where Riggs lived. Their pictures, in their wheelchairs lined up outside his Upper Eastside address, made Life magazine. They wrote him bags of mail. But Riggs seemed spooked by the attention his book garnered. He had his glamorous young wife, Maxine, and she was all he needed. Or wanted. They pulled up stakes and moved to rural Maine. He was working on his next book. That would be how he communicated with his public. Through his words. And he would have kept communicating if Maxine hadn’t been killed.

Maxine was the literary world’s equivalent of Jackie Kennedy. An eighteen-year-old free spirit when they met, she married the handsome, long-haired Riggs when she was nineteen and he was thirty. With long black hair and eyes described as emerald-colored, she dressed with grace and style, and beguiled the rare interviewer with witty comments and an infectious laugh. But after the veterans started seeking them out, Maxine and Riggs retreated to their home and sightings of them became gossip column fodder.

The papers reported it as a tragic accident. She had been standing outside the back door of their white clapboard house, when a trespassing deer hunter shot her. One minute she had smiled at Roland, saying she would go pick them some tomatoes for their dinner salad. The next she was a bloody heap a few feet from her carefully tended garden. Deer bullets leave gaping holes. The hunter never came forward. No one was ever charged.

Roland Riggs’s hair had turned completely white by her funeral. He aged ten years in four days. Within a week, he closed up his house in Maine and took off for parts unknown. He never published his next book. He never spoke to the press. He was never heard from again by anyone but his editor. Then his editor died of old age, and no one heard from him except his publisher’s royalty department.

“He said I’d understand,” Lou looked down at the dust cover to Simple Simon. “He read the article in Publisher’s Weekly about West Side. How I came here after Helen died. Cassie, he wants me…us…to publish his next book.”

I thought, briefly, of falling off the couch for effect, but I stayed in my seat and struggled to sound intelligent. “Why you? Because you’re a widower?”

I stared at Lou. What little hair he had left was silver, and he wore gold wire-rimmed glasses. Short, with a slender build, he would be thought of as elegant. Until someone heard him open his mouth. Then “New Yawkese” came flying out. “Fuck if I know, really, kid. He talked about that night in Key West. How we had a connection. He talked about finding his wife by their garden. He said, ‘I’ve been living with her ghost for over twenty years. She never leaves me. And it never gets better.’” Lou looked up at me. “That’s how I feel about Helen.”